


A shadow named daniel

by kitkattaylor



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Fairies, First Kiss, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Poetic, fae
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 08:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13267398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkattaylor/pseuds/kitkattaylor
Summary: something magical





	A shadow named daniel

There’s a shadow of a man stood behind the rock, and it’s not Phil’s shadow, because Phil’s shadow is behind him, tethered to his ankles just as it should be. So Phil squints against the bleach of sunlight but the shadow is no longer a shadow but a grassy slope, wet with dew. Pulling his cap down on his head, and his nylon jacket down over his knuckles, Phil bumps his bicycle over the gravel and continues forth. His bones rattle with the handlebars as he traverses the trail.  _Down through the valley_ , they said,  _to house number thirty-two_.

The bike’s protesting with sounds like chattering teeth and Phil finds himself consoling his partner –  _I know, I’m sorry_  – and it squeaks in response, old pal. His breath mists in his mouth, dissipating into the air before him, while his zipper presses like an ice cube against his neck, dripping down his shower-warm skin to his belly button. The valley wakes slower than his street up top, with the long, long row of identically painted houses, his at number nine. The town is flat as a monopoly board, where the sky colours down to the ruler-edged horizon, like a child’s drawing. The valley, however, digs into the earth like digging your hands into sand, disrupting the smooth surface, scattering lumps and bumps and cobwebs and damp moss that never quite dries, even in summer.

Phil’s world is slowly tilting sideways – it’s the heavy messenger bag, house number thirty-two have ordered a number of parcels – when the shadow appears again, in a blink, and gone. This time it’s closer, and in the middle of the path in front of him, and Phil’s heart does jolt with the fright, if a little delayed (the lingering sleep cushions him, he’s still getting used to the early starts.) Stuttering to a halt, he lets the wind nudge his waist, his shoulder too, like saying  _hey you, it’s okay, keep going,_ but a ripple in the air crosses his eyes – very, very close this time – maybe just pollen, except if it were it was going against the breeze, like how the shadow went against the sun. Phil squeezes his eyes closed, holds them, and opens, some idea like cleaning a windshield, but the dart of movement crosses his vision in the other direction, maybe dust? And Phil would clap his hands to catch it, but what if it’s an innocent fly?

So Phil continues walking. The pollen, or dust, or fly, seems to be having fun, because it moves with him, wherever he turns his head, dancing to and fro. It makes Phil want to sneeze. He wrinkles his nose, actually, but the sneeze doesn’t come. Maybe he wants to sneeze because there’s a tinny, high-pitched kind of whine knocking around his skull, somewhat like a bee, somewhat like hitting the spoon against the cereal bowl. And then the noise is gone, its memory clearer in contrast to its absence, and Phil thinks on how it also sounded like a muffled voice, a tin-can telephone, when the shadow is back, stood in a flash right in front of him. Of course, it disappears in but a quarter heartbeat, not even mid-gasp, but the image imprints onto Phil’s eyelids like the sun’s own shadow when you accidentally stare at it too long, too direct. It wasn’t a shadow. The image crumpling in his eyes like a burn in paper was no faceless apparition – it was a boy, nose and mouth and eyes and all, and had he said… Phil shakes himself… Had he said… ‘ _Boo_ ’?

“ _Philip…_ ”

Phil tenses, as if there were hands on his back. Or were there…?

“ _Philip…Lester…”_

There was a hitch in the breath, as if the voice had forgotten his surname. Phil let the feeling of hands creep up to his shoulders, and for the sense of (if not the actual) warmth to dilute into the space around his ears and neck. 

“It’s Phil, actually.”

There  _is_ thought given to the fact he may be going mad, hallucinating, sleep-deprived or whatever real, scientific, explanation could be given to the situation. But the breath stills, like the boy were trying to hide, and then the feeling of hands are gone only to be replaced on the front of his shoulders and there the boy appears again, solid, and remaining, this time.

“You’re not scared?”

Had it been a question? Or a statement? Phil just shrugs.

“It says  _Philip Lester_.”

“On my nametag?” And then he’s holding it up from his jacket, away from his chest, and watches as the boy watches him, then peering closely at the printed words. He reads it aloud – like,  _Phil-Lip-Lest-Er._

“It’s my birth name. No one calls me it.”

“Why?” The question is immediate and unforgiving. The boy looks truly perplexed…and unimpressed. Phil just shrugs again.

The boy sighs dramatically and steps back a little, perhaps never realising how unusually close he’d been in the first place, because Phil shivers a little and he just collapses onto the grass – like a starfish, like it were totally normal – and sighs again, as a deflating air-mattress. Phil inches closer – uncertain, but curious – and stares down at him. The boy is blinking up at the clouds, the tiniest gaps between them to prove a blue sky beyond. Phil still has one hand on the bike’s handlebars, quivering a little where it balances on a tumble of jagged rocks. With his other, he pushes his fringe higher under his cap.

“Isn’t it cold?”

“It is.”

“And wet?”

“That it is too.”

Phil pauses. He squints out at the sketchy horizon of the valley, the two fuzzy lines of mountain, tapered to meet at the same tiny point, and thinks on house number thirty-two. The boy wiggles his feet, little cloth-drawn boots.

“So, um, are you a ghost then?”

He squints up at Phil, and takes a long time to reply.

“What do you think is happening?”

Phil considers it. The answer is he doesn’t know. The boy has curly hair, Phil can see it from under his hood, the body of which is baggy and falls down past his hips. His face is soft and made of muted autumn colours, his eyes like shiny pebbles taken from a stream, rubbed smooth between thumb and forefinger. He’d been frowning, just slightly, but now his face is open again, and kind. There’s something that glows as if from within him; it sets him apart from the drained watercolour earth, mud and leaf, like he doesn’t really touch the ground beneath him, nor the air around his arm as he reaches it up, hand pointed, an arrow towards the sky, to the bird – oh no, it’s a plane.

Phil shrugs. “I’m talking to you.”

It’s like a butterfly, how it lands – a bird, not a plane – drawn in a smudge like charcoal onto his finger. The boy smiles softly, pulling it down from the sky, its feathers rustling, head bobbing; real. Then he turns his eyes to Phil.

“Not a ghost.”

With a little whistle, as if he could speak bird, the boy lets the creature go, and turns to stand, brushing his hands. He’s taller than Phil, but younger, if age even exists to him. “Look,” he begins, half lecturing, half shy, “I’m not supposed to talk to you, or scare you, or be seen… All of which I have done, yes, but most people ignore me. You didn’t.”

Phil nods along, a little dumbly. The boy has a demanding presence about him, the kind you can’t turn away from. Or maybe he’s just a little beautiful, actually.

“ _So_ , if you could just forget all about this and carry on with your day, that’d be great.”

Phil’s still nodding. “Okay,” he says. The boy nods back, then he twists his fingers together – no lecturing, all shy – and rocks on his heels, tracing his eyes around the bicycle wheel. It’s a pregnant pause, until the eyes following the tire move across to the messenger bag.

“What…does Phil Lester do with his day?”

Phil perks up, tapping his hands nervously on the bike. “Oh, well, I deliver post.”

“Post?”

“…Letters.”

“Ah.” The boy looks to the other side, lip caught in his teeth. He nervously taps at nothing. Phil slips one letter from the bag, an example, and the boy’s eyes leap to it hungrily, and then so too do his hands.

“Careful,” Phil laughs lightly. He lets the boy inspect the letter, feeling its edges, its corners. “I do parcels too…”

He bites his lip again, politely giving the letter back. Then he links his hands behind his waist, hand to wrist, as if holding himself back.

Phil’s now tapping his foot. “What does…do  _you_ , do with your day?”

The boy makes an awkward face and unclasps his hands, pushing under his hood and flattening his hair. “What do I do,” he mutters, “I’m like, in-between things?” He eyes Phil expectantly from under his lashes and Phil nods, which seems to reassure him. “But since  _you_  weren’t any fun, I guess I’ll go find someone else to scare.”

“Why?”

The boy grins, mischievous, and Phil thinks he feels a blush rising. His smile is like a slither of moon, with his head bent like that, under the shadow of his hood. “Wouldn’t you? If you could turn invisible? If you could become a person’s greatest nightmare?”

Phil frowns weakly. “I don’t know…I’m not sure I’d be very good at it.”

The boy’s grin simmers down to a gentle smile. He lifts his chin. “Humans aren’t very good at anything.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh.” His smile falters, and he curls his fingers around the neck of his hoodie, pulling it up to his eyes. Sighs. Lowers his hands. He’s restless; swinging a little where he stands. “Sorry, Old/New Divide…”

Phil’s bewildered. He scrambles to think of a response, a question. The distance between them pulses and though he’s squinting into the distance, he can see all the younger boy’s little twitches out of the corner of his eye, how he scratches his nose, kneels to look at the wheel again. When Phil turns back, opening his mouth to the most obvious question, the boy runs a finger once over the spokes of the wheel, like a harp, and jumps to his feet.

“You can forget it all later, c’mon.”

And then he grabs Phil’s hand. The bike crashes to the floor as he’s dragged to the left, tripping over his feet to follow. They jog down further into the valley, his cap flying from his head, and Phil, breathless, awkwardly tearing the bag from his body, manages to ask ‘What’s your name?’ just before the world folds in around them, like origami, and when the strange sensation ends, they’re standing on the top of a mountain, two valleys beside them, dry, and hot, stars above.

“Daniel,” he whispers, answers, letting their grip on each other loosen then drop.

Phil’s legs tremble beneath him, and it’s not because he’s afraid – of heights, or otherwise. He still can’t catch his breath. The mountain sides cut steep into the valleys, cavernous like the gaps between rocks at the seaside, the ones you could trap your leg in. How tall he’d feel then, climbing those rocks – now his hair brushes the clouds, and a gentle breeze coos around him, welcoming him to the top of the world. Beside him the mysterious boy of autumn leaves and magic tricks unveils his hood, and lifts his profile to the sky. The stars twinkle dimly down at him through deepening shades of plum and grey. He’s equal to the glow of the moon, here, on the mountain. Their faces tilt towards each other, the moon and the boy –  _Daniel_ – both delicate in their balance, and at once hypnotising.

“The Inside Out.”

Phil slowly tugs his jacket zip down, quietly, not wanting to disrupt anything. The situation feels fragile; it’s simply too extraordinary.

“That’s where you are.”

“…Cool.”

Daniel turns to him with an amused frown. Phil wobbles a little as he sheepishly smiles and raises his hand, pushing the hair from his forehead. But as he does, his sleeve is swiftly tugged and he’s led to sit down, on the rocky ground, with the small patches of grass and the tiny, tear-drop flowers.  

Not five minutes ago the grass around him had been wet, but now it’s dry, and a foreign warmth melts into him, even at this altitude. The breeze is but a whisper now, they’re sat beneath it, and the light has shifted into new shadows on the valleys. They look like comfortable places for giants to lie, or maybe they’ve already lain there, for the ripples in the mountain walls crumple like a blanket, left to settle around the shape of your absence. Phil can think these thoughts now especially, but he would have thought them anyway.

“To clarify… You’re alive, I’m alive. Right?”

“Very much so.” Daniel is sat neatly cross-legged unlike Phil, who is sprawled out, long-limbed (and with a sharp stone under his bum.) He has his sleeves pulled down over his hands and his wavy hair twisting off to the right, his eyes staring out into the distance. Phil thinks he looks at home here. There’s an openness about him, a nervous honesty.

“Do you call it magic?”

It sounds so rudimentary, it makes Phil blush.

Daniel sighs a little, jiggles his leg. “It has been called that.” A dimple deepens in his cheek as he looks at Phil, nodding. Then he turns back. He’s not supposed to talk to Phil… But he so obviously wants to.

 “We are the Ancestry. You’re the beans.”

“I’m a bean?”

He blinks at him dumbly. “Yes.” His gaze doesn’t linger for long, so Phil smiles to himself (and finds his body shifting a couple centimetres closer.)

“We were never deities, or special, no- there’s no more purpose to my life than to a human bean’s.” With the remark he picks a small stone and throws it. Phil can’t see where it lands, maybe it disappears into the abyss below them. “It’s only we have access to a power you don’t. The _Great Wash Cycle_.” He lifts his hands, like gesturing to a Broadway sign. The name connects with Phil’s brain a second later and he fails to stifle a laugh. Daniel slowly lowers his hands. “Yeah, I think someone forgot the original name…”

“The universe has an energy it turns round and round. We can embody it, and replicate it, like-“ He flicks his eyes to the sky. Then softly, as his eyelids roll closed, the sky drains of light. Blackness pools from the edges into the centre, as if Daniel had found the invisible plug, and pulled it. Phil’s smile is giddy and Daniel shrugs again. “It can be anything. Something into something else. Nothing into something. Something…into nothing.”

The moon glows even brighter now. It caresses Daniel’s neck in a way Phil suddenly yearns to.

“That won’t hold,” he mumbles, “I’m not very good.”

Phil wants to argue that. But before he finds the words Daniel lifts Phil’s hand from the dusty ground and presses their palms together. “Look,” he breathes, and Phil does but he wants to look at Daniel, now he faces him again. “I glow.” He turns their hands gently so Phil can compare. Then he glances to Phil – and maybe it was meant to be a glance, but his eyes linger, as does his hand. “We came from the sea, you came later, from the earth. Some of us stayed, at sea, but the sídhe are my family, and we live here, in the Inside Out.”

Phil’s heart taps tentatively against his chest. He doesn’t know why, but he whispers. “Are there like… fairies…and wizards, dragons…”

“There can be anything,” Daniel whispers back.

“…Cool.”

Daniel snaps his hand back to his side. “Cool not  _cool_ ,” he says quickly, defensively, (clearly flustered… and not knowing what ‘cool’ means.) Phil shuffles awkwardly in his seat, blushing to the tips of his ears. This doesn’t happen to him. (By ‘this’ he means interactions with beautiful boys.)

Daniel shivers a little and puts his hood up again. Phil’s still warm, but maybe that’s just the blood thrumming to the surface of his skin.

Daniel absentmindedly traces his finger in the dust.

“It was that you Beans were jealous of us and we had to run and hide but now  _we’re_  jealous of  _you_.”

Phil opens his mouth and closes it. “Why?” Is all he says.

Daniel relaxes his furrowed brow and looks up. “We’re lazy,” he states. Phil is only half listening; Daniel can see it by how he stares. So he looks to the side and rambles. “Take that contraption thing-y you had with you on the Outside. We shrunk and you innovated and now we’re still hiding, and borrowing, and- and turning ourselves to the size of dust.”

For emphasis, he picks up a small curtain of sand and lets it trickle down from his fingers. Phil startles slightly when seeing Daniel’s expectant expression.

“You mean my bike?”

Daniel bites his lip, just softly. His eyelashes flutter and his body sighs down, his shoulders dropping, and for a couple long seconds Phil watches him think. The sky has held its darkness, as the moon has held its brightness against it. The spectacular views around them are muffled, shrouded, not that Phil is looking for them. He’s looking between the sides of Daniel’s hood, to his perfectly constructed face (it seems so, anyway.)

The dimple slides back into the side of Daniel’s mouth as he tilts his head down, concentrating, and then there between them rises a tiny dragon made of dust, wings flapping, weak with effort. When it breaks, it sparkles like rain back to the mountain floor. Phil’s heart swells.

Shy, Daniel peers at Phil from inside his hood, under his lashes. It’s his held breath that makes Phil lean across, lean in, just brushing his nose to the side of Daniel’s nose, above his lips. He holds himself there, his mind catching up to what his body has done, when Daniel turns his head to the side, leaving Phil to awkwardly rearrange his limbs beside him, as if he hadn’t just tried to kiss him, and been rejected.

“They don’t feel the same,” Daniel speaks, and Phil clasps his hands together in his lap, and nods. “They want me to frighten you, but I don’t frighten anyone. And I don’t feel superior. I don’t want the old world back, instead of the world you’ve created.” Now he turns back to Phil, undeterred by the new distance between them. Close enough to see freckles.

“I go because I’m curious, of you, and your world.” Phil can’t help it- looking down at his lips. “I think human beans are quite fascinating.”

He’s so sincere in his confession Phil can’t stop the affectionate smile from seeping out. Daniel stares at it.

“Believe it or not, for all the magic you’ve shown me, I’m most fascinated by you.”

His face radiates heat the second he says it. Phil isn’t a confident guy, never forward, never smooth. Daniel smiles gently with gratitude, and he looks so human like that, with a blush to match Phil’s blossoming on his cheeks. The smile begins to look sad. And then he reaches forward and zips Phil’s jacket up, careful and neat, and Phil watches as his hands rise to his collarbone. He catches Daniel’s eyes, and they sit suspended, until Phil leans forward and lines his lips up with Daniel’s and finds he’s kissing the air; a shadow. It’s cold, but Phil knows it’s him, because you can’t kiss a shadow, and then the ground and sky fold in around them, just as before, and Phil’s back stings with a damp chill as he wakes on a bed of grass, deep between the valley walls, a boy who looks like he doesn’t belong staring down at him from behind his bike.

Phil gets up shakily, but just as he places his hands over Daniel’s, over the handlebars, Daniel is gone, there and gone, in the blink of an eye. Pollen, dust, or a fly, is what he turns into, a pin-prick in the fabric of the world. Phil wants to grab it and unravel it, tear the veil open again, but the speck of something isn’t visible anymore, and Phil can’t hear anything either, nothing but birds, or planes, and a palpable silence.

The wind skates in around him, busy in its path to elsewhere, moving on, moving on, and Phil shrugs his bag back onto his shoulder.

 _House number thirty-four,_ he mutters to himself, breath condensing in front of him. He says it a couple times.  _House number thirty-four, House number thirty-four._ His bike rattles, the bell on it dings, accidentally. It’s chattering on, wanting the gossip, the story. Phil doesn’t let himself think on it yet. He continues on through the valley, to house number thirty-four, and when he reaches it no fairies, or wizards, live there, only a sheep farmer, and his sheep. So he delivers the post. 


End file.
